相关论文: Intricate Knots in Proteins: Function and Evolutio…

Proteins can sometimes be knotted, and for many reasons the study of knotted proteins is rapidly becoming very important. For example, it has been proposed that a knot increases the stability of a protein. Knots may also alter enzymatic…

Long, flexible physical filaments are naturally tangled and knotted, from macroscopic string down to long-chain molecules. The existence of knotting in a filament naturally affects its configuration and properties, and may be very stable or…

The ongoing effort to detect and characterize physical entanglement in biopolymers has so far established that knots are present in many globular proteins and also abound in viral DNA packaged inside bacteriophages. RNA molecules, on the…

Proteins are linear molecular chains that often fold to function. The topology of folding is widely believed to define its properties and function, and knot theory has been applied to study protein structure and its implications. More that…

The computer artificial intelligence system AlphaFold has recently predicted previously unknown three-dimensional structures of thousands of proteins. Focusing on the subset with high-confidence scores, we algorithmically analyze these…

Molecular dynamics studies within a coarse-grained structure based model were used on two similar proteins belonging to the transcarbamylase family to probe the effects in the native structure of a knot. The first protein, N-acetylornithine…

Although rare, an increasing number of proteins have been observed to contain entanglements in their native structures. To gain more insight into the significance of protein knotting, researchers have been investigating protein knot…

Knotted proteins embed a physical (i.e., open) knot within their native structures. For decades, significant effort has been devoted to elucidating the functional role of knots in proteins, yet no consensus has been reached. Here, using…

Proteins must fold quickly to acquire their biologically functional three-dimensional native structures. Hence, these are mainly stabilized by local contacts, while intricate topologies such as knots are rare. Here, we reveal the existence…

Knots in proteins have been proposed to resist proteasomal degradation. Ample evidence associates proteasomal degradation with neurodegeneration. One interesting possibility is that indeed knotted conformers stall this machinery leading to…

An increasing number of proteins are being discovered with a remarkable and somewhat surprising feature, a knot in their native structures. How the polypeptide chain is able to knot itself during the folding process to form these highly…

Approximately 1% of the known protein structures display knotted configurations in their native fold but their function is not understood. It has been speculated that the entanglement may inhibit mechanical protein unfolding or transport,…

The backbone of most proteins forms an open curve. To study their entanglement, a common strategy consists in searching for the presence of knots in their backbones using topological invariants. However, this approach requires to close the…

Knots are abundant in globular homopolymers but rare in globular proteins. To shed new light on this long-standing conundrum, we study the influence of sequence on the formation of knots in proteins under native conditions within the…

Proteins with nontrivial topology, containing knots and slipknots, have the ability to fold to their native states without any additional external forces invoked. A mechanism is suggested for folding of these proteins, such as YibK and…

Knots are fascinating topological structures that have been observed in various contexts, ranging from micro-worlds to macro-systems, and are conjectured to play a fundamental role in their respective fields. In order to characterize their…

The art of tying knots is exploited in nature and occurs in multiple applications ranging from being an essential part of scouting programs to engineering molecular knots. Biomolecular knots, such as knotted proteins, bear various cellular…

The presence of slipknots in configurations of proteins and DNA has been shown to affect their functionality, or alter it entirely. Historically, polymers are modeled as polygonal chains in space. As an alternative to space curves, we…

We perform theoretical studies of stretching of 20 proteins with knots within a coarse grained model. The knot's ends are found to jump to well defined sequential locations that are associated with sharp turns whereas in homopolymers they…

Quantification and classification of protein structures, such as knotted proteins, often requires noise-free and complete data. Here we develop a mathematical pipeline that systematically analyzes protein structures. We showcase this…